


An Anatomy Lesson (On Secondary Sex Characteristics in Mammalian Species)

by Culumacilinte



Series: Take My Hand AU [3]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Crack, Fanart, Gen, Gender Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:44:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>C'rizz is tired of being constantly misgendered by humans. Charlie makes poor conversational choices. The Doctor takes her shirt off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Anatomy Lesson (On Secondary Sex Characteristics in Mammalian Species)

 

‘ _Humans_!’ C’rizz exploded, storming into the TARDIS. Both Charlie and the Doctor turned to look at her in surprise. Certainly C’rizz could have a temper, but around them, at least, annoyances tended to be expressed by way of sardonic grumbling rather than shouting.

‘Is it _that difficult_?’ she continued. ‘The number of times I’ve been called _mister_ or _sir,_ or, or— _that thing_! I realise I don’t look like them, but is it that hard to tell a female Eutermesan from a male one? I don’t _look_ like a man. It’s not even just humans, either! Half the species we meet seem to think I’m male!’

Charlie seemed to have no idea what to say to this outburst; the Doctor, for her part, felt a slight twinge of guilt. She had noticed the frequency with which C’rizz got misgendered on their various adventures, but C’rizz always simply corrected people and moved on. She hadn’t seemed overly bothered by it. The Doctor was particularly forgetful in this regeneration, and it seemed she’d also forgotten how adamant some species could be about their genders. It wasn’t terribly important to her, if she got the wrong pronouns now and again, or if her body didn’t always quite align with her mind. As far as she was concerned, gender was a bit silly anyway, and surely there were more important things to focus on. For C’rizz, though, getting constantly mistaken for a man might well feel like a slap in the face.

She was still fuming. ‘And I know for some species it doesn’t matter, or they have, I don’t know, more than just the two genders, but for me, it does! I’m a woman, what the hell do I have to do to get that through their thick skulls?’

‘Welllll,’ Charlie started slowly, and the Doctor quirked an eyebrow. In most ways, Charlie had adapted with admirable alacrity to their lifestyle, but the boy was still a Victorian. Though he tried, his understanding of the complexities of gender and performance was rudimentary at best. ‘Most human women— or, human _oid_ women, I suppose— have, well, _breasts_ , C’rizz.’

‘Breasts.’ C’rizz’s look was blank and annoyed.

‘They’re— like the Doctor, her chest?’ Charlie waved a vague hand in the general direction of the Doctor. His cheeks had coloured, and he only looked at her for a moment before his gaze flitted away; he clearly hadn’t thought that conversational gambit through before he’d spoken. The Doctor couldn’t actually read minds without physical contact, but nonetheless, she could practically Charlie thinking, _Oh, well done, Charleston, now you have to talk about the Doctor’s breasts._

C’rizz merely looked curiously over at the Doctor, focussing on her chest without any shame at all. ‘What, you mean, those lumps? They’re a sex characteristic? What are they for?’

Charlie looked back to the Doctor, his expression subtly desperate. Perhaps it was a _little_ mean to do nothing but raise her eyebrows back at him, but he had started it, after all; the Doctor was curious to see how he’d finish. And to his credit, after that moment, Charlie recovered his composure with aplomb, adopting a rather schoolmasterly tone.

‘Humans are mammals, you see. That means they produce milk—’

‘I thought milk came from cows, you said?’

‘Well, yes, cows are mammals too.’

For someone with an exoskeleton, the Doctor reflected, C’rizz’s face could be remarkably expressive. At the moment, it was expressing a combination of fond bafflement and annoyance. The plates of chitin where her eyebrows weren’t bent together. ‘How? You and the Doctor don’t look anything like cows.’

‘Mammal is a _classification_ , C’rizz,’ the Doctor chimed in, taking pity on Charlie. ‘Generally used to categorise animals with specific traits; the birthing of live young, production of milk, body hair, and so on. Of course, as a means of sorting, it can rather fall down when confronted with the wild diversity of species the universe— or universes, even!— has to offer, but that’s often the way.’

‘Oh.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed Charlie. ‘Like the Doctor said, mammals also give birth to live young— not in eggs or anything, I mean. Well,’ he pulled a face, ‘mostly. The babies gestate inside the mother’s womb until they can more or less survive in the world, but when they’re born, they’re not equipped to eat solid foods; all they can do is drink milk, which the mother produces.’

‘And what does that have to do with these breasts?’

Charlie wrinkled his nose. ‘They’re, well, glands. That’s where the milk comes from.’

C’rizz looked briefly horrified, and the Doctor stifled the urge to laugh out loud. ‘You mean— humanoid females— they _grow_ their young _inside_ them, and then the children… drink from their bodies? That’s disgusting.’

‘Strictly speaking,’ the Doctor said thoughtfully, the thought occurring to her, ‘I’m not a very good example of the utility of breasts, as Gallifreyans aren’t actually mammalian.’

‘You’re not?’ Charlie sounded, just for a moment, almost betrayed. He had a bad habit of forgetting that ‘non-human’, when it came to the Doctor, didn’t only mean that she had a time machine and more than one face. When he spoke again after a beat, though, the only thing left in his voice was curiosity. ‘You _look_ like a mammal. I mean, you’ve got… hair, and everything.’

The Doctor laughed. ‘What did I say about human classifications falling down when confronted with the wild diversity of the universe, Charlie? Mm, no, more reptilian than anything else, really. Though Gallifreyan genetics have been mucked about with so much over the centuries, hard to tell how we might’ve turned out if we’d evolved naturally.’

‘By Rassilon, you mean? His experiments with regeneration and things?’

‘Him and others,’ agreed the Doctor. ‘You know, it’s funny, for a race which really isn’t properly physical at all, we have spent an awful lot of time tweaking and fiddling with our bodies. Vanity, I suppose.’

‘Not properly physical—?’ Charlie started, but C’rizz overrode him.

‘Why’ve you got these breasts, then? If you don’t use them for— feeding your young.’ C’rizz still looked vaguely repulsed by that concept. ‘You can drink milk, I’ve seen you put it in your tea.’

The Doctor pulled a thoughtful face. ‘That… is a difficult question to answer. We used to conceive and bear children in the traditional mammalian fashion, but I don’t know that Gallifreyans ever breastfed. I’m tempted to call it purely cosmetic. A vestigial trait that we would have evolved out of if it hadn’t been deemed fashionable.’

Both Charlie and C’rizz were looking rather lost at this point, and the Doctor laughed, shaking her head. ‘Oh, here, let me just show you. How’re you supposed to know what I’m talking about when I’m all covered up?’

In this incarnation, the Doctor had a much more relaxed attitude towards clothes than she’d had in some of her previous bodies, who had stubbornly refused ever to change out of their favoured costumes, no-matter how much it might make them stick out in a given time or place. This time around, the Doctor quite enjoyed dressing up. She also quite liked being naked, and didn’t really see the fuss about nudity. It came, she expected, from her formative hours in that hospital in San Francisco, wandering around in nothing but a shroud. The initial period after regeneration could have interesting effects on the final product; it was probably also to thank for her poor memory in this body. 

So now her hands went to the buttons of her double-breasted jacket carelessly, without hesitation. She shucked it, crisp white shirt following after, both thrown over the console; underneath, she wore a sensible black bra. She bit her lip, eyebrows twisting elaborately as she reached behind herself to try and unhook it.

C’rizz watched this whole process with interest, eyes lingering on the Doctor’s stomach, which must, she imagined, look shockingly soft and vulnerable to her. ‘This is taboo, isn’t it?’ she asked as the Doctor finally managed her bra-clasp. ‘In your culture, I mean. That’s why you and Charlie go around covered up all the time.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the Doctor agreed merrily. ‘But in Time Lord culture, even showing the _neck_ is taboo, would you believe it. And everyone goes about dressed in bedsheets. Most of what I do is taboo, really, by Time Lord standards. As for Charlie, Earth cultures swing back and forth on the issue of nudity; in his home time period, though, yes, very taboo.’

She grinned a little mischievously, looking over at Charlie to invite him to share in the joke— how silly these repressive norms were! Charlie, though, had gone bright pink all the way down to his collar, and was studying the floor with great care. The Doctor shrugged, and turned back to C’rizz, lifting her hands to cup her breasts.

‘And these— are breasts! You can come closer to look, if you like, C’rizz. Think of it as an anatomy lesson.’

C’rizz did, cautiously fascinated. ‘Weird. And they just… sit there on your chest?’ Her hands went to splay over her own chest in a kind of curiously sympathetic gesture, the chitin just under her fingers warming from blue into a pale bisque that echoed the Doctor’s skin tone.

The Doctor chuckled. ‘More or less. They don’t detach or anything.’

‘And what’re those bits?’ C’rizz nodded in indication, and the Doctor briefly touched at her left nipple.

‘Nipples, those’re called. If I was equipped for it, that would be where any hypothetical babies fed from. _But_ , being as I don’t have the glands to actually produce milk, they’re essentially ornamental.’

It was a strangely enjoyable experience, being the object of C’rizz’s scrutiny as something intensely, bizarrely alien, and the Doctor watched her with fondness. She often took it for granted that her appearance would be unremarkable in most places of the universe; it was refreshing to be proven wrong on that count. One of C’rizz’s hands made as if to touch, but she paused the gesture halfway through, eyes flicking up to meet the Doctor’s. 

‘Do you mind?’

‘Oh, be my guest.’

She might have expected C’rizz’s fingers to feel cool on her skin, but they weren’t, especially. Just one with the ambient temperature of the room, and faintly ridged on the fingerpads, in a way that echoed the ridging on her head and chin. They traced over the Doctor’s skin, catching briefly and ticklishly on her nipple in a way that made the Doctor giggle.

‘I’ll never get over how soft you and Charlie are,’ said C’rizz, weighing the Doctor’s breast in her hand. ‘It’s bizarre, I feel like you should just be, I don’t know, falling out of your skins all the time.’

Perhaps prompted by the mention of his name, Charlie cleared his throat from behind them. Both C’rizz and the Doctor turned to look, C’rizz’s hands falling away. Charlie, the poor boy, was still flushed, hands fidgeting at his sides.

‘Well,’ he said, clearly making an effort to keep his voice even, ‘You must know a lot more about anatomy and evolution and all that than I do, Doctor, so, um, I’ll just leave you and C’rizz to it? There was— I think I left a book in the pool room, I wouldn’t want the damp to get to it.’

He left at a pace calculated to seem like it wasn’t rushing. The Doctor winced slightly. ‘Whoops.’

C’rizz tactfully didn’t comment, and the Doctor gave her a rueful little grin. ‘Possibly I should put my clothes back on?’

‘Possibly,’ agreed C’rizz wryly. The Doctor didn’t entirely like her expression; she felt sure she had the wrong idea about her and Charlie, but she didn’t want to encourage her by bringing it up. 

‘Thanks for, you know,’ C’rizz gestured, ‘showing me.’

‘Any time,’ said the Doctor magnanimously. And then, more seriously, she added, ‘And thank _you_ for letting us know that it bothers you when people misgender you. I hadn’t even thought about it.’

‘Yes, well,’ C’rizz shrugged. ‘I don’t like to make a fuss.’

There was more to it than that, the Doctor suspected, given what they had learned about Eutermesans from Rassilon; that perhaps sometimes C’rizz was _unable_ to make a fuss. She blew air between her lips in a scornful _pah_. ‘Nonsense! Basic decency, getting referred to as one likes. And now Charlie and I know. Simple as that.’

Not wishing to let the moment linger so long as to become awkward, she snagged her bra off the console, and set to getting herself dressed again. C’rizz stayed where she was for a few moments, watching the Doctor with slightly narrowed eyes, as if there was something she wanted to say. ‘Thank you,’ she decided on eventually, and left the Doctor to finish buttoning her buttons and tying her cravat.

Some time later, the Doctor peered into the pool room to see Charlie sitting at the pool’s edge, trousers rolled up and feet kicking idly in the water, reading a book.

‘I’m wearing clothes again!’ she called, by way of greeting, and Charlie’s rueful little laugh echoed off the pool’s surface.

‘Hello to you too!’ He turned another page in his book, not looking up, and the Doctor strolled over to sit next to him on the floor, legs crossed and coattails spread out behind her. A few minutes passed as Charlie finished the chapter he was on, and then set the book aside. _Rookwood_ , the Doctor saw. She never had got ‘round to finishing that book.

‘Next time you’re planning on stripping off,’ Charlie said wryly, ‘could you at least do me the favour of telling me first?’

‘In fairness,’ the Doctor pointed out, ‘I wasn’t exactly _planning_ on stripping off, it just seemed the best course of action at the time.’

Charlie gave her a look, eyebrows raised; she was, the Doctor realised, perhaps being a bit insensitive again.

‘Of course. Next time I feel the desire or necessity to get naked, you will be given ample time to vacate the area.’ She paused. ‘Well, unless it’s a life-or-death sort of thing, in which case I will simply do the best I can not to offend your delicate Victorian sensibilities.’

The joke worked. Charlie laughed, just a little exhalation through his nose, head dropping briefly so that a few curls bounced onto his forehead. When he looked back up again, he was smiling. ‘Fair enough. You can have leeway on life-or-death situations.’

‘Oh, good,’ the Doctor grinned. ‘That would be a terribly undignified way to regenerate, refusing to take my clothes off. I quite like this me, I’d like to hold onto it as long as possible.’

Charlie whacked the Doctor lightly on the shoulder with the copy of _Rookwood_ he’d been reading. The Doctor splashed him. It didn’t, in the end, devolve into a splash-fight, but that was probably only because neither of them wanted to ruin the book.


End file.
